The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry

The famous quote from "To a Mouse" by Robert Burns becomes relevant today because, in spite of all efforts, things have gone wrong for Trevor over the weekend and we have spent a significant part of it trying to make up for the loss.

The fact is that Trevor had been planning a sleep-over with one of his friends for a long time. His family moved out of town at the beginning of the school year, so they do not get to see each other unless there is a special occasion. Luckily, there is also the Internet, where they meet pretty much any time they are allowed computer time. Still, meeting face-to-face, specially in the tricky times of the corona virus pandemic, has a different quality and Trevor has been actively pursuing it for over a month, and that with much effort from our side too.

Photo: pxfuel

The first concession was that they would spend the night at our place. Will was already here in late August, so technically it would be his turn to play host, but his family is rather complex, with a bunch of younger siblings, so understandably they do have plenty to do at home without a guest.

The second "update" referred to the date, which kept moving from Tuesday last week, to Thursday, to Friday and finally last Saturday. The kids are on vacation, but Will returned to school today, so it had to be either last week or wait for a favorable weekend. So we kept accommodating our schedules (not that it took much, because we have essentially no plans thanks to COVID-19) to support the get-together.

Finally, some time early last week Trevor said that everybody at Will's place would be busy on Sunday morning, so there was not problem for him to come on Saturday afternoon, but one of us should drive him back. There again, we agreed on the condition that Trevor joined for the drive so that he could keep me company along the way.

In spite of all the concessions, on Friday evening, barely 24 hours before he was scheduled to arrive, Will sent a message to Trevor saying that there had been a change of plans and that he had to cancel on us. Of course, all of us felt rather insulted after all the lengths we had gone to to try to make the plan work for him, but by far the most affected was Trevor, who kept lamenting "Why do these things always happen to me?". All in all it is not that frequent that we suffer cancellations, but you know how the fundamental attribution error works: you always waive by the bad things that happen to others but resent painfully the ones that happen to you.

At any rate, we manage to figure out a number of interesting things to do with Trevor over the weekend, cooked a couple of special meals, watched a long awaited moving and, all in all, I believe that he had a good time even if Will could not show up. Let us see what the rest of the week brings. Cheers.